were not many of these Yaricoes; and
should not perhaps have given credit to an historian rather prejudiced
against the English, if I had not found too much authority for the
general practice. In the canons of a council at London in 1102 we read,
Let no one from henceforth presume to carry on that wicked traffic by
which men of England have hitherto been sold like brute animals.
Wilkins's Concilia, t. i. p. 383. And Giraldus Cambrensis says that the
English before the Conquest were generally in the habit of selling their
children and other relations to be slaves in Ireland, without having
even the pretext of distress or famine, till the Irish, in a national
synod, agreed to emancipate all the English slaves in the kingdom. Id.
p. 471. This seems to have been designed to take away all pretext for
the threatened invasion of Henry II. Lyttelton, vol. iii. p. 70.

PART II.

Progress of Commercial Improvement in Germany, Flanders, and England
--in the North of Europe--in the Countries upon the Mediterranean Sea
--Maritime Laws--Usury--Banking Companies--Progress of Refinement in
Manners--Domestic Architecture--Ecclesiastical Architecture--State of
Agriculture in England--Value of Money--Improvement of the Moral
Character of Society--its Causes--Police--Changes in Religious Opinion
--Various Sects--Chivalry--its Progress, Character, and Influence--
Causes of the Intellectual Improvement of European Society--1. The
Study of Civil Law--2. Institution of Universities--their Celebrity--
Scholastic Philosophy--3. Cultivation of Modern Languages--Provencal
Poets--Norman Poets--French Prose Writers--Italian--early Poets in
that Language--Dante--Petrarch--English Language--its Progress--
Chaucer--4. Revival of Classical Learning--Latin Writers of the
Twelfth Century--Literature of the Fourteenth Century--Greek
Literature--its Restoration in Italy--Invention of Printing.

[Sidenote: European commerce.]

The geographical position of Europe naturally divides its maritime
commerce into two principal regions--one comprehending those countries
which border on the Baltic, the German and the Atlantic oceans; another,
those situated around the Mediterranean Sea. During the four centuries
which preceded the discovery of America, and especially the two former
of them, this separation was more remarkable than at present, inasmuch
as their intercourse, either by